hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr4528.txt

Episode: 4528
Title: Photography software
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4528/hpr4528.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:19 (official HPR transcript)

---

This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4528, for 2025-12-10
Today's show is entitled, "Photography software"
The host is Henrik Hemrin and the duration is 00:07:51
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "My software related to photography on my computer."
Welcome to Hacker Public Radio. My name is Henley Cameron and I'm your host today.
Today I will list and talk briefly about software related to photography that I have installed on my computer.
I run them on Linux Mint Debian Edition. Many of them are also available for Windows and Mac OS.
Link to the websites are in the show notes.
Digicam is the center of my photography tools. For me it's very important with a good catalog software,
or in another term digital asset manager, DAEM.
I was a long time user of Adobe, Album and Photoshop elements.
Three years ago I migrated to Digicam. I also consider it specifically dog table.
A major reason for selecting Digicam in favor of a dog table was that Digicam had face tagging, which dog table did not have.
I believe it is still the case for dog table.
Although Digicam has its major strength as a digital asset manager, it can also do most things needed for photography.
For example, I've tested editing and post processing in Digicam, but I have not made up my mind if I will learn it more in detail.
If Digicam is good enough for my needs or how I will continue to also use other tools.
So for now I use several tools where some have overlap on each other.
To develop raw photos I mostly use raw therapy. It is a focus tool for that purpose.
It is in my view a very competent tool and is relatively easy to learn for my basic operations.
Raw therapy stores its record in its unique PP3 side core, which both means it is no risk for conflict with the XMP side core.
I update in Digicam, but it also means I do not change any method from raw therapy.
Dog table should also be possible to use for this purpose if you want to investigate that alternative.
For other editing of photos, I also have GIMP in my toolbox. GIMP is probably the most well known of my tools.
Pix is a photo tool that comes with Linux Mint, is one of Mint's own tools.
I often use it for viewing photos in general, but it is capable of more than that.
To import photos from my camera memory card into my file catalog system for photos, I use rapid photo downloader.
Also this function exists in Digicam itself. I started to explore rapid photo downloader at the time when Digicam had an issue with iPhone or Linux, which rapid photo downloader did not have.
This is not an issue for me anymore because I do not use iPhone anymore, and this you may have been solved as well.
However, I have kept on using rapid photo downloader because it has a good file naming function, and because it can store the photos in two locations in parallel, which means I get one,
photo to my work in directory for photos, and also an untouched photo to a separate backup disk.
A drawback when I use rapid photo downloader is that it adds one step. I must offer the photos are imported, go to Digicam and search for the new objects to add them into Digicam.
Next tool is the use scan. It is the only software in this presentation that is not free and open source. It is developed by a small family business company.
The use scan is a very well known independent scanning software. It is also a good software for advanced uses, and I'm not aware of any scanning software available for Linux that is close in its features, and one of the best for an operating system.
It works for very many scanners from many manufacturers, so when learning to use the use scan it means I can reuse the knowledge for almost any scanner on any platform.
I have an interest in to Digitize analog photos, both my own analog photos, but also all the family photos and other printed material. The use scan is a very useful software to me.
But another method to Digitize analog material is reproph photography. It means to use a digital camera to take a photo of the analog material.
It is also a very good method, and some use this method only. I use both scanner method and reproph photography method currently.
When I use a Digitile camera for reproph photography, I connect the camera to a computer, so I can view the ongoing task on a big monitor, and just the camera settings, trigger the shot, and also store the photo directly to a computer.
This method to use the computer is often called Tethered Shooting. I use a Tangle for this.
And Tangle may not work for all cameras. In that case, dark table has added this feature, so that can be an alternative, alternative, although I have not tested it.
Finally, a software for monitor calibration. I do not calibrate the laptop monitor, but I do calibrate the external monitor.
I use DisplayCell, together with my hardware data call or Spyder 5. DisplayCell relies on RGL CMS. The latest release of DisplayCell is currently from 2019.
It means that maybe if you have a more reason to color emission meant device, it may not work.
Also, the RGL CMS is said not to work on the way land, and it looks as colour management on the way land is a big topic of itself.
That was the software for photography. I wanted to cover in this episode.
Except for dark table, I use all of them to some degree, and except for views can all of free and open source.
If you have any alternative suggestion or feedback as a user of any of them, I spoke about please free to tell in the episode comments or record a show.
Thank you for listening. Take care and goodbye.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.